A fulfillment center is a facility, warehouse or other like structure that is adapted to receive items from vendors or other fulfillment centers, and to store such items in one or more designated storage spaces, areas or units (e.g., cubbies, receptacles, bins, shelves) therein. Such fulfillment centers may include stations for receiving shipments of items, for storing such items, and/or for preparing such items for delivery to customers. When an order for the purchase of one or more of the items stored in a fulfillment center is received from a customer, the ordered items may be retrieved from the spaces, areas or units in which the ordered items are stored, and prepared for delivery to the customer, e.g., by packing the ordered items into one or more appropriate containers with a sufficient type and amount of dunnage, and delivering the containers to an address designated by the customer.
Online marketplaces are increasingly popular electronic forums through which customers may place orders for one or more items over the Internet. The growth of online marketplaces, and the rapid expansion in the scope and breadth of their available offerings, has led to a concomitant proliferation of fulfillment centers. Online marketplaces usually use fulfillment centers to allow vendors to maintain inventories of items that are available for sale at the online marketplaces in a centralized location. Typically, upon the receipt of an order for one or more items that are located at the fulfillment center, a list of the items included in the order is provided to a staff member or one or more autonomous mobile robots at the fulfillment center on paper, electronically (e.g., to a handheld computer maintained by the staff member), or in any other format. The staff member or robot must then traverse the floor of the fulfillment center to physically retrieve the items from the spaces, areas or units in which they are stored, and transport the items to a distribution station in preparation for delivery to the customer.
Because today's online marketplaces offer a wide variety of items to customers, including but not limited to goods, services, products, media or information, fulfillment centers now include increasingly large and complex facilities having expansive capabilities and high-technology accommodations for items, and feature storage areas as large as one million square feet or more. Therefore, in order to prepare and ship an order that includes a large number or different types of items to a customer, a staff member or robot may be required to walk several thousand feet, or even miles, within a fulfillment center in order to retrieve the items in fulfillment of the order. Where a customer submits multiple orders for items, the arduous task of picking, packaging and shipping ordered items must often be repeated for each and every order.
Moreover, for all of their technological advancements, today's fulfillment centers are still plagued by the inefficient use of space. For example, fulfillment centers are commonly box-shaped buildings having a plurality storage spaces, areas or units, each of which is sized and sufficiently durable to support loads of a standard or nominal size or dimension (e.g., fifty pounds, nine cubic feet, or forty pounds per square inch), regardless of whether the spaces, areas or units are actually so loaded. Fulfillment centers also include a number of machines or other features for providing services and utilities to such centers, including cabling, piping, ductwork and the like. Despite the fact that fulfillment centers are designed and intended to receive and distribute items, significant portions of the fulfillment centers remain unused for storage.